death for real
by Douglas Messerli
Nagisa Oshima, Tsutomu Tamura,
Mamoru Sasaki, and Toshio Tajima (Screenplay) Nagisa Oshima 日本春歌考 (Nihon shunka-kō) (Sing a Song of Sex / A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs) /
1967
Similar
in some senses to Oshima’s film of the following year, Three Resurrected Drunkards, his 1967 film, Sing of Song of Sex, also titled, much more appropriately I would
argue, A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs,
is a much more abstract and unresolved work that doesn’t quite know what to do
with its four leading schoolboy rebels.
Certainly, we can comprehend this work, in
part, as being in the tradition of other nasty schoolboy affairs such as Zero for Conduct, Zazie in the Metro, and most notably, The Clockwork Orange, the incendiary foursome of Ohsima’s world—led
by slightly more intelligent, confused, and coldblooded Nakamura (played by pop
singer Ichiro Araki), along with Ueda (Koji Iwabuchi), Hirori (Kazuyoshi
Kushida), and Maruyama (Hiroshi Sato)—begin as sort of provincial bad-boy
school kids taking their final examinations in Tokyo and end up through their
increasing violent fantasies as misanthropic rapists and imaginative and,
ultimately, real murderers. Whether or not they are also xenophobic,
Korean-haters, is open to question.
Their alcoholically-inclined and
apparently lecherous teacher, Mr. Otake (Juzo Itami, director of the later
popular Tampopo) licentiously invites
them to join him at what appears to be a sex-club called “The Lawrence,” an
invitation they reject with disgust, attempting to link the strange English
name with possible associations such as the author of Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover and with Lawrence of Arabia, T. E.
Lawrence, but also recognizing that it has no specific meaning (to me, it
sounds somewhat like an effete gay bar, a thought which is encouraged by Otake’s
unnecessary squeezes of their facial features; yet there’s evidence in Otake’s
behavior to suggest he is anything but heterosexual). Indeed the boys, quite by
accident, after unintentionally leading a demonstration against the
reestablishment of Founder’s Day (an event banned by the Allied occupation
after World War II)—reminding one a bit of Charlie Chaplin’s leading a
Communist protest in Modern Times—discover
Otake with a woman, following the couple as they make their way in two
directions, choosing to track the woman, whom we later discover is Otake’s
girlfriend, Kazuko (Oshima’s wife, Akiko Koyama) to her office. These
activities, however, merely represent their boredom.
What they’d truly like is to track down
the beautiful woman who they spotted in the test room with them, No. 469 (Kazuko
Tajima), a name arrived at by her seat number during the examination.
Despite their dismissal of Otake, however,
they and three women students are all somehow attracted to him, and find
themselves that evening, sharing a table with him at a local Tokyo bar, where
the women, obviously spellbound by him, peel his shrimp and serve him up glass
after glass of beer. The boys look on in amused disinterest in their
professor’s pedantic fulminations until, quite out of the blue, he begins a
rather long disquisition about folk, erotic, and bawdy Japanese songs which, he
argues, he the way for Japan’s oppressed to express their feelings. The song
that most clicks with the boys is one in which, in stanza after stanza the
song’s hero(es) bed with various young girls, some pretty, others so ugly they
must put a bucket over their heads, each stanza ending with “ho, ho!”
Otake soon becomes drunk, but still takes
them to another late-night hang-out, where they discover the hour to be so late
that they have missed their train connections; the professor offer-ing to put
them up in hotel rooms, while promising to take them on museum tours the
following morning.
After a series of typical adolescent grabs
and jabs of one another, they clumsily attempt to get the girls next door to
open up their room so they might fulfill their “licentious” (a world few of
them actually know the meaning of) intentions. They fail miserably, Nakamura,
discovering when he attempts to write out the word for the girls, that he has
lost in pen in Otake’s room.
It is at this moment, when Oshima’s movie
turns from a kind of Japanese version of a teenage bromance into a very strange
movie, as the most mature of these adolescent figures discovers his professor
in a drunken stupor, having accidently overturned a room heater and loosened it
from its connection, the room beginning to fill with poisonous gas.
We never know whether or not he has
recognized the seriousness of the situation; we only witness him gloatingly
singing the bawdy song over the snoring elder. But in the morning, when the
boys are told by the girls that the professor as died during the night and that
police are investigating the event, the boys suddenly reveal their dismissal
and disdain of the world in which they live, mocking the stupidity of their
professor’s actions while the girls whimper and cry out in for the sadness and
horror of the event.
Taking Nakamura aside, she sings another
kind of song, a song of a Korean indentured prostitute singing to her clients.
For a moment, it appears, the insensitive leader of this little “gang” almost
seems to be touched by the work, which he half-realizes suggest that the girl
is of Japanese-Korean descent. In that recognition, we even wonder whether some
of Nakamura’s anger may have something to do with his own heritage. If nothing
else, he takes the occasion to explain that he, himself, may have actually been
responsible, for not having corrected the situation, for their teacher’s death.
Suddenly, she is determined that he tell that truth to Otake’s girlfriend, Kazuko.
In the very next scene the four buddies
are seated at a kind of after-funeral meeting with a larger number of Otake’s
males students, discussing what they might include in a large celebratory
publication of their professor’s collected works. Even here, ultimately, they
hostile boys break up the more proper ceremonies by singing their bawdy song,
and after a fight breaks us, Kuzuko orders them all out of her house.
Somewhat inexplicably, the others discover
that no. 469 is hosting a celebration to protest the Viet Nam war, and three of
them (sans Nakamura) along with
Kaneda attend the obnoxiously Americanized sing-along of most well-dressed
young women and men in colorful knit sweaters join in chorus after chorus of This Land Is Your Land and other
standard protest songs (all sung in English) of the day. The three delinquents
attempt several times to disrupt the event—without success—until Kaneda again
sings, microphone in hand, her Korean prostitute lament.
The party celebrants, after a pause of
confusion, eventually applaud her performance, responding with probably the
only song they know about social “outsiders,” We Shall Overcome; and soon after we see a group of the crew-neck
sweated boys carrying her off in celebration.
Meanwhile, Nakumara has returned to
Kazuko’s house to convince her of his guilt in Otake’s death. In disbelief, she
forces him to play out the entire event, and, in the process, ends up being
raped or, perhaps, willingly having sex with the young man. She too, it becomes
apparent, is of Korean ancestry, the fact of which has kept her from marrying
Otake, and, even more importantly, from “feeling” the pain of life, including
her own true feelings for her beloved dead lover. In her after sex conversation
with Nakumara, we feel even more sure that he may share some of experiences as
she tells a story about a love affair between to, obviously, slave Korean mine
workers, one of whom, it turns out, is simply the ghost of the living
being. Its metaphorical implications
reiterate her own spectral existence and, once again, suggests why Nakumara is
both so brutal and, quite apparently, sympathetic. The two of them decide to
join the other three and Kaneda at the home of 469, to whom they have
presumably visited in order to admit to their violent fantasies.
It is here where Oshima’s almost mad tale
begins to completely unravel. Kaneda returns dressed in a beautiful gown, the
gift, apparently, of the collegiate-like good-boy singers who have evidently
raped her before awarding her that prize. Immediately recognizing the
situation, Kazuko insists Kaneda remember and retain the pain of the event,
demanding that she suffer as opposed to her own divorcement from the world of
feeling.
Terrified by the increasingly personalized
lyrics of their bawdy song, Otake’s former lover, Kuzuko attempts to deliver a
long speech of the “true” history of Korean-Japanese royal ancestries. It is a
grand attempt to drag the centuries of hatred back into reality in order to
stop the symbolic and real sacrifices of life in modern times. Yet, her
historical harangues concerning the royal houses and god-appointed emperors on
both sides, have utterly no meaning for these dissociated lost beings who kill
simply because they can: No. 469, stripped of her clothing by his three
friends, is finally faced with a cold-hearted murderer through Nakumara’s
resolve; for, the first time in her life, she realizes that this time he is
serious, the murder he enacts upon her body, this time is for real.
If throughout this Oshima film reads more
like a treatise on societal violence than a documentary portrayal of it, the
work is all the intellectually gratifying because of that fact. There is no
logical answer, obviously, about why certain cultures deny other cultures their
sense of identity and being; it is always a result of a madness that can only
be comprehended, if ever, in retrospect.
Los Angeles,
September 8, 2015
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